Ever since he bought his first camera more than 50 years ago, Karl Perry has never been far from the shutter button.

His dad ran a camera shop in Missoula, Montana and on a summer trip to visit Perry’s paternal grandparents in Waverly, Kansas he found a 69-cent plastic camera in the local general store that shot 1 x 1-5/8 images on 2-inch film.

“Dad told me he wouldn’t pay for me to bankrupt him with color film, and I would have to learn to develop and print my own black and white stuff,” Perry remembers. “I was instantly hooked by this magic that happened when I exposed the paper in the enlarger and this white sheet suddenly revealed an image of a scene I had shot.”

Now, he uses a Nikon Z7 digital camera with Nikon’s new Z lens system and a long Nikkor telephoto for wildlife.

So, it’s no surprise that even as he continues to work in the tech sector, his life in Port Ludlow has revolved around capturing the scenery that rears up in every direction as you circuit his place on the bay.

Trained to do the technology side of product marketing, his work life is devoted to smoothing the path groceries take into your grocery cart and through checkout.

But what he’s alert for the rest of the time is the same thing that’s kept him focused on photography since childhood: pictures no one else has.

And that’s why, on the evening of Sept. 7, he shut off the TV and headed outdoors in a thunderstorm, when most others headed indoors.

“We were just wasting our Saturday night watching television and the lightning started and we stood outside on our deck and watched it,” he explains.

“I’ve lived in Washington State all my life. We moved here (to the hillside above the Port Ludlow Beach Club) nineteen-and-a-half years ago and I’ve really seldom seen a storm like this.”

When the storm shaped up to be a good one, Perry and his wife jumped in the car and headed for the Hood Canal Bridge for a better look.

They weren’t alone in the pullout on the south side of state Route 104. Several other cars had pulled over to watch.

Looking for a better foreground, they moved down into the Shine Tidelands Park.

And then he had to wait.

He had left at home the metal plate by which his camera is secured to his good tripod, so he had to settle his Nikon on a rock.

“I just set the shutter to 30 seconds. You do that and trust to luck.”

First shot...dark sky...18-19-20...no lighting...28-29-30...flash!

Second shot...lightning...click-1-2-3-4...nothing...27-28-29-30. And then flash.

And so it went five or six times until finally, he twice had the shutter open when lighting hit.

Fortunately for Perry, he was right about the magnitude of that storm. In Western Washington, clearly visible from park at Shine, the storm pulled big electrical impulses up out of the earth about eight times per minute, with National Weather Service systems measuring 2,200 strikes between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Perry admits he and his wife wondered “Is what we’re doing really wise?” but in the end, he exemplified the legendary street photographer Arthur “Weegee” Fellig maxim: “f8 and be there.”

In other words, great technique and gear are useful, but the most important ingredient is to go where the action is and start shooting.

Which is what Perry did.

Lest Port Ludlow neighbors worry an adrenaline junky has moved in next door, Perry has supplied some other, less death-defying, shots he has taken in the years since that 8-year-old boy slung the strap of a dime-store camera over his neck.